What to do if your guitars won't cut through the mix

Are your production skills ruining your song? Then these tips from industry pros are for you

Nothing cripples a great riff and a great song quite poor production. So, once you’ve tracked your stank face masterpiece and you put a rough mix together, what can you do if the guitars won’t cut through?

In the art of music making, the ideas is just one cog in a much larger machine, and sometimes, when a listener presses play on your music for the first time, a good mix can be the difference between them sticking around and becoming a fan, or moving on and forgetting about you entirely.

If you’re reading this, the chances are that the music you write is guitar-driven, and so your mix will want those instruments – and those frequencies – to be the focal point. If your riffs can stand out in the right way, you can too. But how can you do that?

Mixing – where to start

Most professional mixing engineers don’t approach their mix from the very first bar of the song. While this might sound a little counterintuitive, there’s clear logic behind this decision.

For Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Tesseract, Caligula’s Horse), context is king.

“I play it through to understand the whole song,” he tells Guitar World. “Then I’ll start with the section that needs to have a very specific energy, like a breakdown. It's very easy to make a chorus feel big or to make an intro sound small – but it's very difficult to make something feel like it has an impact if things aren't set up in the right way.”

He talks about “cherry picking” the song’s most important moment, and starting there. Equally, George Lever (Sleep Token, Loathe, Monuments) leans into the section he’s “vibing” with the most, which equates to the same sort of tact.

A quick note on panning – rhythm guitars should always be hard panned left and right. This creates a nice, wide sound, and leaves space for the bass and drums to slot into the middle and other layers, such as synths and strings, to fill the remaining spaces.

Reel it in

In the Instagram age, it might help to think about reels. If you were to clip up just a 20 second snippet your song to get people’s attention, what are you picking? That, right there, is the most important section of your song. So if you can start there and ensure each layer and instrument sits comfortably in its place, without having to battle for frequencies with other parts, it can set the tone for the rest of the song.  

To those ends, other engineers pivot towards the loudest and busiest part of a song. That way, when layers are stripped back, parts can generally stay in the same place, and mixing the rest of the song becomes a lot easier. If everything has a defined place at the densest part of the song, mixing the rest should – in theory – be a doddle.

Troubleshooting

If, after following this tip, the guitars are getting lost in the maelstrom, Savell has some handy advice.

“Panning can be a great way to make things stick out,” he says, emphasising the value of hard panning. “If you've got one guitar in the middle, as soon as you start to move it off to the side, it instantly gets more attention because it becomes asymmetrical.”

This is a great point. Guitarists are best to avoid quad tracking every part of a song to avoid things getting messy.  The more tracks there are, the more tiny little nuances in playing between takes there are to clash with one another – things like the scrapes of the string, or a slightly out-of-tune bend. It can clog up the audio space.

For certain parts, that asymmetrical approach makes the guitar line pop because it sticks out of the mix, rather than constantly chewing up the widest reaches of a mix.

“The other thing I’d ask if it’s not standing out,” Savell continues, “is, ‘Is it the right part? Is there something that would carry that moment better?”

We guitarists can be a little too riff centric at times. Not all verse parts needs a killer riff – a simple, spacious part can be way more effective – and that approach applies throughout the song. Is the reason the guitars aren’t cutting through the mix because there is so many other things to contend with?

Is the riff, alongside a busty vocal line, cluttering things? Would it be better to dial things back and let the vocal lead?

Octaves and frequencies

Lastly, if you have a part with many different layers, be that all guitars or across different instruments, it’s worth looking at what octaves each part is playing in.

If all your guitars are low down and dirty, saw in the C2 octave, then it would be wise to have synth pads, string layers and whatever else you have occupying higher ranges.

Not only does this help produce a broader, more cinematic sound, it also stops the parts stepping on one another’s toes. Go through your MIDI parts and moving the octaves around, see how that opens up spaces in the mix.

Think of it like a football stadium with five different turnstiles. If a capacity crowd comes storming through one turnstile, things will get clogged up very quickly. If the fans spread themselves equally between the five separate turnstiles, the flow of traffic will be much smoother. That’s how you want your mix to be.    

Want to master your mixing?

If you crave better mixing chops, and learn how small tone tweaks can help your mix shine, then Modern Metal Academy’s Recording Masterclass is for you.

Featuring 24 in-depth lessons clocking in over nine hours of tips and exercises, join us as we explore the process of achieving optimal sound quality for your music and demos. Learn in your own time, at your own pace as we analyse mixes and how to optimism them for catching the listener's attention in the modern era by dissecting Monuments' Lavos, which has over four million Spotify streams. 

Head here for more – we’ll see you there.